Real
by peggie sue
Summary: Every night, Olivia wants a story from when he was a kid.


_**A/N:**_ Shitgoddamn these adorable motherfucking fuckers.

They're laying in bed when he asks her, "Why do you like these stories so much? From when I was little? Or from when my kids were little?"

He had just finished telling her about Dickie, maybe seven, trying to walk their turtle, Alfredo, like a dog down the block one December.

"Dunno," she answers quietly. She does know. "I just do."

She likes them because he was the only person that ever raised her. She likes them because she likes to think about him wide-eyed and grubby and impressed about things, innocent, and she likes to think about him carrying his brother when he fell out of a tree and broke his arm or trying to work this fancy new video camera at Maureen's first dance recital.

She likes them because he is her dad and her brother and her naive, innocent, wonderful lover. She likes them because there was a time when he was her hero. That whole first year, he could do no wrong. He was the biggest guy, the strongest guy, the best guy. He was Superman and she loved him more than she'd ever loved anybody, but not like she does now. She loved him because he was the kind of guy who knew how to make a kite fly or who'd never heard of Nabokov but could quote Dr. Seuss on the spot—he'd recite Green Eggs and Ham for her right there on the street if she'd asked. He'd teach her how to tie her sneakers or something and God, she was invincible around him in her big baggy suits and clunky shoes and kiddie smile. He was everybody she'd ever wanted.

"You're weird," he whispers, and yawns.

She is. She knows. "I know." His yawn is contagious but hers is louder, and maybe he kisses her hair, but she doesn't really feel it.

"What else d'you want to hear tonight?" he asks her, and it's impressive that she's gotten him to talk like this. Elliot Stabler is not a talker—neither is she—but right in the minutes before she falls asleep, his voice runs like water. It fills the bed and the bedroom and the hallway and her ears, sometimes like the tap, sometimes like a hurricane.

She rolls over from her side onto her stomach, turning her face towards his. Their noses almost brush but don't. Her right arm settles around his neck, and like always, her fingers scratch at the cropped strands of hair there. She would like to clarify that this is not snuggling, this arm-slung-around-the-neck business. This is just existing, and happening to do so in very close proximity. Later she promises she'll roll away in her sleep anyway and take all of his blankets with her. For now she just thinks it's comforting to comfort him, or something like that, and he likes it because he's told her so. She yawns again, still audibly, and says, "Just... anything. Just talk."

He doesn't mean to say it, but the way her words get caught in the wind tunnel of her exhaustion, the way she needs him but still doesn't feel allowed to, the way her hair is wet and messy, the way her eyes have bags under them and her body feels as delicate as it does strong makes the words come anyway. "I'm sorry."

She pops an eye open, and her squint is funny. "For what?" she mumbles, displeased, because she just wants to listen. She is not in the mood for conversation—just fairytales, or something of the sort. He wonders if anybody has ever told Olivia stories before him and he decides that no, they probably haven't. It makes him sorrier, because he's so validated and filled up and calmed by her fingers against his skin that he needs the same calm, the same validation to have existed in every minute that she's ever lived in.

It hasn't.

"Just..." he trails off, because_ I'm sorry that I'm the only one that's ever loved you this much_ is a terrible thing to say to somebody you're trying to keep around for as far as time will take you. It strikes him then, finally. "I'm sorry I told you there was no crying."

She misses it, doesn't understand him. "S'cuse me?" It's sleepy, and she probably isn't really awake, she probably isn't paying attention, she probably doesn't remember.

He takes a breath. "Coupla months into our partnership... maybe seven, maybe almost a year, I dunno, we had this case and you—"

"Steven Panachek. Tanzic." How the fuck she remembers these things, he'll never know.

"Yeah. Guy gets murdered, turns out to be a Serb under indictment for war crimes, raped sixty-seven women and two of them got into his cab one day and killed him right then."

"I know, Elliot. I was there."

"Olivia." _Look at me_. He is going to return to his original point. She doesn't look up because she'd rather he didn't, she'd rather he never admit to being anything other than the perfect beautiful thing that he was back then. She's allowed to have something unblemished, she's allowed to have one thing, and that's it. That's the oldest Elliot. He can't touch it, have it, wreck it.

"No," she whispers, because she wants or needs him to stop. "No."

"_Olivia_."

"Elliot, this doesn't matter. This conversation doesn't matter." This woman remembers everything, and he'd been a fool to think for a second that she wouldn't.

"Olivia," he tells her, and he says her name over and over until it's gentle enough for her to meet his eyes. "Liv, you cried during that case."

"I was a kid."

"You were a good fucking detective, and those women reminded you of your mother."

"Don't psychoanalyze me, Elliot."

He gives her a second. "You made yourself sick, and I told you to stop. I told you there was no crying in baseball and I don't think I ever saw you cry on the job after that day."

She swallows. "Yes you did." Gitano, probably. She would put good money on the fact that she cried during the Gitano case, and he'd probably at least heard about her crying into the phone over Maria Recinos, and she vaguely remembers being sent home once by Huang after bawling on the couch in the loft.

"Olivia." Those same letters have fallen out in that deep, gruff, papa bear way of his a million times tonight. "The point is that I was insensitive. I was... I was a bastard to you, because I was your senior officer and thought I was pretty hot to trot and I think I didn't even realize—I can't... I don't want to be the reason, to have been the reason, for you to have taken so much on for so long because you thought that was what you had to do. Because you thought that was the job."

"Elliot." He will not take this. He will not mess up this memory.

"No, Liv, I—I was so wrong. I thought I was so tough and great but all I was was—"

"Elliot."

"Angry. I was just angry. And, I mean, there _is_ crying in baseball, and that was such a dumb thing to say because I don't know if I knew that maybe you'd actually take me seriously, that you'd buy every word of it, and you ask me for all these stories as if I'm this barometer of happiness, or what love or something should be, and it's not just not, it's... it's _not_, because I'm just one more person over all these years that's steered you wron—"

"Elliot." The whisper is seething, fiery, charged this time. "Elliot, do you... do you even know why I like your fucking stories so much?" She sits up in bed because she doesn't want his eyes to look at her through the dark when she makes a blubbering fool of herself. T-minus zero minutes until that happens.

The question itself takes him by surprise, and he doesn't really answer.

"It's because I'm allowed to have one perfect thing."

_What?_ "What?"

"I am allowed. I am allowed to have one thing in my life that nobody else can mess up, and that's it. You're it. You ten years ago or you when your kids were little or you when you were eleven and doing something ridiculous—that's it. That's my perfect thing. That's..." she trails off, flails her hands through the air, re-adjusts.

"Before I met you, I had no idea that existed. That people like you existed. And that whole first year, or even the second year and the third one and maybe even longer—whatever—of _course_ I took everything you said so seriously. Of course I did. I... that whole first year, Elliot, I believed with my whole goddamn heart that you could hang the moon and the stars and push the motherfucking world around on its axis. Of _course_ I looked at you that way," it's a whisper but almost a yell. She wants to shake him. Instead she continues, her words coming out in a rush but weighted with conviction, molasses on her tongue.

"You were... you believed in me, and you did things like braid hair and paint nails and play soccer in the backyard and _I wanted that_. And you didn't give it to me quite so obviously but God, that's exactly what you gave. I... I did more growing up that year than I ever have in my whole life because for the first time, somebody_ believed_ in me. Somebody looked at me like I was important, and I felt important, a-and I _am_ important. And you made me that way, because you're my perfect fucking thing. So don't... don't look at me, and try to find all the ways you've failed or something. That's not fair. Don't say you're sorry for something so inconsequential in comparison to... to everything else, and don't you _dare _try to take that something else away because you know what it—you know how much it means. You know you're the only one who's ever—" She can't say it. "Don't you dare try to mess it up. I don't care if you gave it to me—it's mine."

He wants to laugh that she's so defensive and up in arms about him, possessive and protective of his stupid kiddish smirk, of his life back when he didn't know what the fuck he wanted. He wants to laugh that he fell in love with Olivia Benson, of baggy suits and clunky clogs, of those giant watery eyes. He wants to laugh at the fact that he's still falling, right now, in this minute, in her bed. "It's yours?" he chides, because he needs to make the air lighter, he needs to remind her that being loved isn't always a heavy thing.

She looks down over her shoulder at him, stubborn. "Yes. It's mine."

She will guard every single one of his mundane days with everything she's got. She will never find them anything less than perfect, and here, in her mismatched pajamas, with her reading glasses and three week old New York Times dog-eared on the nightstand, he wonders if she knows that he couldn't exist inside of his perfect, average life without her. He'd say it out loud but he thinks that maybe her eyes would well up, and probably she'd smack him for being cheesy.

Instead: "I'm yours?"

Her brow stays comically furrowed and he knows she's doing it on purpose. "Yes."

"I can hang the moon?"

She rolls her eyes to continue the game, the teasing, but he sees her soften. "Nah." It's a quiet concession. "Not anymore."

"Gee. Thanks."

It's still not snuggling when she lays back down in the crook of his arm and presses her face against his neck. "You're real now," she tells him.

"So I've lost my perfect thing status? It's stuck in 1999?"

She doesn't answer right away, just yawns. Maybe kisses his jaw. Decides to be honest when he slides his fingers up through her hair. "Real is better."

_I love you._

_I love you, too._


End file.
